Author: Kelsey Myers

Being informed that you are eligible for something and then having to wait month after month for it to actually happen can cause a certain kind of frustration. Ask any of the approximately 5,300 borrowers who were granted preliminary approval for student loan discharge back in March. Since then, they have watched their loan servicer dashboards for weeks, waiting for a balance that will not go down to zero. In a court-mandated status report submitted last Wednesday, the Education Department verified that discharges from the March batch were not processed at all in April due to issues with data validation,…

According to his father, Lewis Waters was gregarious and humorous. The kind of eighteen-year-old who took care of his friends, loved his sisters, and gave everyone around him hope that everything would be alright. He went to The Henley College in Oxfordshire, a sixth form that draws pupils from about 100 schools in Berkshire, Buckinghamshire, and Oxfordshire. It’s the kind of place that hums with the unique energy of young people who are almost adults but not quite, and who firmly believe they are unbeatable. Lewis Waters experienced sepsis within hours of becoming ill. According to his family, the ICU…

A school organizing a summer social with activities like face painting, tug of war, and bouncy castles while also getting ready for the possibility that it won’t happen in the fall is incredibly unsettling. That is the exact paradox that currently exists at the core of St. Joseph’s College in Reading. The invitations were sent out. It is likely that the sausages were ordered. And a 130-year-old institution subtly hinted that it might be finished somewhere between those happy Instagram posts and a very different kind of letter sent home to parents. The Board of Governors sent the letter, which…

The pitch for college basketball’s most ambitious early-season event is being made somewhere in a conference room, most likely with a large screen and good coffee. There are eight programs. Play pool. Chicago, New York, and possibly other places are neutral. Money that most athletic directors can’t help but smile about. Either the Diamond Cup will change college basketball’s November landscape, or it will quietly vanish into the heap of audacious concepts that failed to make it through contract negotiations. It’s really difficult to say which right now. The names associated with this proposal are obviously serious. Together, Arizona, Connecticut,…

On a Tuesday morning, you might see a laminated certificate with the words “Outstanding” in bold next to the entrance of a primary school. The certificate is slightly sun-faded. Parents read it slowly. Some people take pictures. It may seem insignificant, but it conveys a lot about the importance of a single Ofsted rating in England and the pressure that surrounds it in staff rooms and headteachers’ offices, where people are secretly fearing the next inspection. The school inspection system in England recently underwent its biggest redesign in a long time. Ofsted no longer assigns a single overall effectiveness grade…

In Southern Pines, there’s a small gas station on U.S. 15-501 South. It’s a Circle K, the kind you walk by mindlessly. A man by the name of Jaquell Kelly entered, gave a dollar, and left with a Cash 5 ticket sometime prior to the drawing on May 13. A few days later, he was sitting in the Raleigh headquarters of the NC Lottery, taking home $93,613 after taxes. That had about a 1 in 962,598 chance of occurring. According to reports, Kelly referred to it as a “fluke.” It’s difficult to ignore the sheer number of people who stand…

A 1970 photo of Bill Gates reveals something significant about him. At sixteen, he is seated beside his friend Paul Allen at a Teletype terminal at Lakeside School in Seattle. They are both gazing at the machine with a level of concentration that is not performative. That terminal was purchased by the Mothers’ Club with money from a rummage sale. Perhaps no rummage sale in history has had more repercussions later on. Gates was raised in a cozy and competitive home in Seattle. The family played board games and cards with real stakes, and losing had repercussions. His parents desired…

On a Tuesday morning, you will observe things in a special education classroom that are not included in any policy report. The teacher’s desk was piled high with binders. The sticky notes that indicate incomplete IEP documents. With his headphones on, the student in the back corner appears to be focused solely on a screen. These seemingly insignificant details reveal a system that has consistently been underfunded and asked to accomplish too much with insufficient resources. But something is beginning to change. Artificial intelligence is slowly but surely finding its way into special education classrooms, and when it does, the…

You can learn nearly everything about Elon Musk in a single moment. The year is 1995. One of the world’s most esteemed universities, Stanford University, has accepted him into a PhD program in applied physics. After arriving and taking a look around, he disappears two days later. Not because he didn’t succeed. Not because he was incapable of doing it. since he had somewhere more fascinating to be. Musk has always viewed formal education as a starting point rather than a destination, as evidenced by that decision, which was both impulsive and obviously intentional. He was raised in a comfortable…

A school building that punishes its occupants has a very unsettling quality. Not in the dramatic sense of broken windows or crumbling ceilings, but rather through a more subdued and draining form of failure. The kind that appears every May, every January, and yet manages to surprise everyone and nobody at the same time. That is currently the Cardozo Education Campus in Ward 1 of Washington, D.C. Midway through May, classrooms are 95 degrees. In a heat that would cause most office workers to call in sick, students are attempting to focus during finals and Advanced Placement exams. While attempting…